An easy pop culture reference for you in the title. Especially because I explained it last week. My
apologies this is running a bit late. Glad
to see you all made it through the Mayan Doomsday with no problem, though.
This week’s
topic is kind of timely because I just got notes back from my editor and he’s
called me on this in a few places. I’ve
also recently read two books by other people that suffered a lot on this front,
and it kept good stories from being really great stories.
So let’s
see if we can work through this together.
You might
remember when your junior high school teacher would talk about first person and third person. And third person would get divided up, too,
with phrases like omniscient or objective or limited. If you’re anything like me, you probably
erased most of that from your internal hard drive as soon as the quiz was
over.
If we’re
going to take this whole being-a-writer thing seriously, though, it means going
back and re-learning this stuff and knowing how these rules work. More to the point, we need to understand how
they work so we can use them without confusing or frustrating our readers. A lot of otherwise good stories I see get ruined by an erratic, irregular point of view... or by a complete lack
of one. They jump from character X to
character Y to an omniscient point of view to Z’s first person point of view
and then back to X’s journal.
For a
reader, this is a lot like trying to watch a movie while riding a Tilt-A-Whirl.
For those
poor folks who didn’t get that last reference, a Tilt-A-Whirl is a carnival
ride that spins the riders in one direction while moving them up and down on a
circular track that’s spinning in the other direction.
Let’s do a
quick recap.
First
person is when the narrator is a character in the story, usually (but
not always) the main character.
Everything I see or read in this story is filtered through that
character. I see what she sees, hear
what she hears, feel what she feels, know what she knows. That knowing bit’s important—in a first
person story I’m getting access to all the narrator’s thoughts as well. This can be very freeing, but very limiting and challenging as well.
I’ve
mentioned epistolary style here a few times. It’s a form of first person where the writer
tells the story through letters, journals, and other “existing” material
produced by the narrator (or narrators).
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, and so are Tony
Faville’s Kings of the Dead and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel
Keyes.
Second
person is very, very rarely used, but I’ve seen it done a few times so
I thought it was worth mentioning. It’s
when the main character is you and the writer projects all the action and
emotion onto you. “You walk down the
hall and a feeling of unease begins to creep up your spine.” Second person is tough to work in because I’m
forcing my reader into the story and taking away all their control. It’s not my story or Wakko’s story—it’s your
story, and you’re going to do these things and feel like this and
react like this. That tends to be
kind of awkward.
If you
remember the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, those were usually done in
second person. And you may remember that
they were a bit odd to read, especially if you picked one up later in
life. If you’re a bit geeky,
second person is like having a dungeon master who takes control of the whole
game.
Third
person is still the most common point of view for fiction, even with
the rise of first person stories in the past decade or so. It’s an independent, non-involved narration
of the events of the story. In a third
person story, the reader is just a spectator.
There’s still a question of how much they see, though...
In a third
person omniscient story, the reader gets access to
everything. I see Yakko, Wakko, and
Dot’s actions—no matter where they are—and I also see inside their heads. I know what they’re thinking and how they’re
reacting to things, even when they don’t show it. I don’t have numbers to back it up, but off
my own experience I’d guess most stories get written this way.
A third
person limited story keeps the reader as a spectator but limits
how much they see. I may decide we’re
only going to focus on Wakko and not wander away to see what other characters
are doing. Or perhaps I’ll only let the
reader see actions and not get access to what the characters are thinking.
The trick
with limited is that it’s like looking through a telescope or a pair of
binoculars. I can see certain things
very clearly, but not other things—even if they’re very close. And if I try to switch targets abruptly, it
gets very confusing.
So, it’s
clear that a big part of storytelling is the point of view. It affects how the narrative unfolds. It also determines what kind of
things the writer can tell you or explain during the course of the
story. If I have an inconsistent point of view, it’s going to be jarring and
break the flow of my story. If I’ve
chosen the wrong point of view, things may come crashing down around me right
from the start.
Now, I’m
sure some of you are wondering how can there be a wrong point of
view? Sure, it may change the story a
bit one way or another, but how can the point of view be wrong? It’s just an arbitrary decision, right?
Consider
this example...
Let’s say
I’ve decide to write a mystery novel in third person omniscient. I start off with my detective (let’s make her
a female). So for the first few chapters
I’ve got access to what’s going on around her, what she thinks of the various
people she meets, what they think of her, and so on. Then we get to the crime scene and... well,
hang on. Maybe the murderer’s here. If she is (yep, the killer’s female, too) the
reader will know instantly because we’re seeing what’s going on inside her
head. I mean, it’s kind of a cheat if the murderer’s here at the scene of the crime and not thinking
about the murder, right?
So maybe
it’s better if we just never peek inside her head. Of course, any savvy mystery fan is going to
wonder why we’re seeing inside everyone’s head except Phoebe’s (yep, it was
Phoebe all along), and they’re probably going to assume it’s because she’s the
killer. And they’ll be right. In which case this isn’t a mystery anymore, it’s just withheld information... and poorly withheld at that.
Of course,
I could just decide to see inside Phoebe’s head from the start, but now this
isn’t a mystery. If we know she’s the
killer from the start, this is more of a suspense-thriller. And it’s a tricky one, because now the
detective is going to be playing catch-up with the readers for the whole book.
It’s worth
mentioning that Alfred Bester pulls off a wonderful third-person omniscient
mystery in his book The Demolished Man.
But it’s kind of a trick. The mystery in his story isn’t who the
murderer is, but how he managed to pull off his crime in a world where all
police are telepaths.
So,
choosing the right point of view is important in a story. At best, the wrong one can mean a lot of
extra work. At worst, it means I might
find I’ve written myself into a corner.
Another
important thing to remember is that my point of view needs to be
consistent. If ninety-five percent of my
book is focused on Phoebe and her thoughts and her actions and what she sees,
it’s going to be very jarring on page 324 when the narrative suddenly jumps
into Wakko’s head for a few paragraphs.
If I switch viewpoints five or six times in the same chapter, it can get
confusing real fast. If I’ve been doing
an epistolary novel for the first three-quarters of my manuscript, switching to
third person omniscient for the last quarter is going to take some
adjustment. And as I’ve pointed out many
times, odds are the way readers will probably deal with this is deciding to put the book down and get caught up on all those Person of Interest episodes
on their DVR.
If you want
to switch points of view in your story, here’s a couple of tips that might
help...
Chapters – Writing different chapters from
different points of view has been a standard for centuries. Mary Shelly did it in Frankenstein. Faulkner did it. Heck, even William Shakespeare did it. It was fairly common for different scenes of
Will’s plays to jump to different locations and focus on different characters. If it was good enough for him... well, who am
I to say that doesn’t work?
In the Ex-Heroes
series I switch from third person to first-person every third or fourth
chapter. That first person point of view
is entirely contained within the chapter, though.
Markers – This is like the chapter method but
on a smaller scale. Stephen King uses
this one a lot. He’ll be writing from
one character’s point of view and then use a set of markers or flags to make it
clear a shift has happened.
# # #
The readers
continued to scroll down through the page, gleaning small clues and hints. Some of the tips were subtle, other direct,
and everyone took a little something different.
A few of the readers shook their heads and scoffed at the ideas being
presented, convinced that they had a better grasp of what writing really involved
and how it should be treated. They
mocked the idea of limiting creativity with rules or even loose
guidelines. But most of the readers saw
the simple truths the blogger was trying to get across, and they got some
useful tips from the post.
# # #
See how the
narrative shifted there? But you
accepted it—both times—because of the markers.
They let you know what was coming next was different from what you were
just reading.
In a way, this
is one of the oldest methods. Lots of old
novels were done in the epistolary style, and this gave the reader an automatic,
familiar marker for the start and close of each viewpoint. I try to use this method in the non-flashback
chapters of the Ex-Heroes series.
Do It As Little As Possible—Some people think
switching viewpoints is hip and edgy, so they do it as often as possible, in as
many ways as possible. There’s nothing
wrong with this in theory, but—like flashbacks—there needs to be a real reason
for it. If I’m just switching viewpoints
to switch viewpoints... well... that’s
going to get old really quick.
Lots of
books have three main characters and spend alternating chapters with each
one. As mentioned above, though, these
characters rarely come in halfway through the manuscript. It’s clear from the beginning that these are
the points of view the book will use and it sticks to them.
Don’t Do It At All- this is a bit challenging,
but if you can pull it off your readers will love you for it. Just stay in one voice—one viewpoint—for the
entire story. No cutaways or cheats.
There are
certain drawbacks to this method. If I
never switch viewpoints everything has to come from the same direction. If I’ve chosen to tell the entire story from
Yakko’s first-person point of view, then everything that happens has to meet
Yakko’s language, his experiences, his knowledge base. But this can make for a very, very powerful
story if done right.
And there
you have it. A quick (well, not that quick) overview of
different viewpoints, and a few tips on how to use them in your stories.
Next
week... well, later this week, really... it’s Christmas. I’m enjoying some time off, to be
honest. But maybe I’ll put up something
about the year in review and we can all see how well my time was spent. And maybe talk about yours, too.
Until then,
have some eggnog. And try to write a
little bit.
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